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What is the difference between a gerund and a participle?

Uticensis
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Arlen Beiler
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3 Answers3

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A gerund is a form of a verb used as a noun, whereas a participle is a form of verb used as an adjective or as a verb in conjunction with an auxiliary verb.

In English, the present participle has the same form as the gerund, and the difference is in how they are used. When used with an auxiliary verb ("is walking"), it serves as a verb and is the present participle. When used as an adjective ("a walking contradiction") it is also a participle. However, when used as a noun ("walking is good for you"), it is a gerund.

See the Wikipedia articles on gerund and participle for more details.

Community
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nohat
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  • N.B. It's not really so simple as a gerund being a "verb used as a noun". Think about "walking is good for you", and consider the following variant: "Walking quickly is good for you". Notice how an adverbial form is used to modify what you are positing to be a "noun". Consider also the pair "Him arriving"~"His arrival". The latter is ostensibly noun-like, but the former has some important differences. – Neil Coffey Jan 29 '13 at 15:54
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    @Neil, whoa, let's look at the words I actually used: used as a noun, not "is a noun". The syntactic role taken by the gerund or gerund phrase is that of the subject of a verb, which any elementary school student could tell you is a noun. If we want to get fancy in our terminology, a gerund phrase is a kind of verb phrase headed by the gerund-participle (-ing) form of a verb, which used in a syntactic slot for a noun phrase. – nohat Jan 29 '13 at 19:14
  • I repeat: it's really much more complex than this. I also think that defining "noun" as "subject of the verb" is extremely questionable, incidentally, but in any case I don't think it helps you here. How in your definitions do you account for e.g. "I disagree with him smoking". Your answer is fine as a very simplistic starting point-- my objection is simply that you're failing to mention or acknowledge that things are in reality much more complex. – Neil Coffey Jan 29 '13 at 20:32
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    @Neil The analysis of constructions with pronouns + gerunds is complicated and not even universally agreed upon. Answers to general questions of grammar will always be simplifications. I would expect that most people understand, at some level, the fractal nature of the grammar of natural language, and there are always edge cases. The original questioner wasn't asking specifically about those cases, and in all likelihood probably wouldn't have been all that interested in a detailed analysis of them. I did link to the Wikipedia articles on the topic, which cover it pretty exhaustively. – nohat Jan 29 '13 at 23:13
  • That's fine, but note that I'm really not talking about "edge cases". For example, a structure of the form "Him quick arriving" is always* ungrammatical and it's a basic property of a gerund that it has verbal arguments. You're absolutely right that the status of "gerund" is a million miles away from "universally agreed upon"... so therefore, I would have expected a good answer to emphasise this fact. – Neil Coffey Jan 30 '13 at 02:08
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    @NeilCoffey: Gerunds are traditionally analysed as being able to function as constituents the same way as nouns, but taking mostly verbal arguments themselves. So they are "externally" nouns, "internally" verbs. And there are always edge cases, as Nohat says. But the criterion "a gerund phrase can be replaced with a noun" is in most cases fairly clear and satisfactory. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Aug 30 '13 at 13:25
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    @Cerberus - I would broadly agree (with the odd caveat: by 'noun' we really mean 'noun phrase', and people need to appreciate what this and 'gerund phrase' actually means). Essentially, the thing I'm keen to warn people against are the nonsense pseudo-arguments that spring up around gerunds, e.g. the supposed logic behind insisting on replacing "Him" with "His" in "Him coming wouldn't be a problem". – Neil Coffey Aug 30 '13 at 19:52
  • @Neil: Yes, noun phrase rather than noun—"noun" is just a lazy abbreviation, if you will. The issue with his v. him is indeed complicated, because it is both an edge case for those who maintain a distinction between gerunds and participles, and a stylistic issue, with advocates for and against him. I would be inclined to analyse him as a participle, because this construction is, I believe, analysed similarly in languages where it exists and participles have a different form from gerunds. It would be very interesting to find out more about the first use of the his/him construction(s). – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Aug 30 '13 at 20:25
  • @Cerberus One interesting problem is determining the history of 'what construction' exactly. The gerund/participle construction that we have today is apparently an amalgam of what were once two quite syntactically distinct constructions (one of which clearly nominals specified with genitives, the other clearly adjectival). Gradually, the two constructions have been merging, and the 'him' constuction arose during that merger, possibly early ModEng, as the amalgam began to allow a richer set of arguments generally. [cf De Smet (2013), "The gerund/participle distinction in Late Modern English".] – Neil Coffey Aug 31 '13 at 22:38
  • @Cerberus That's my limited understanding from doing a quick bit of skim-reading... if you find out any more about the history of these, I'd be very interested to know! – Neil Coffey Aug 31 '13 at 22:41
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    @NeilCoffey: Ok, so are you suggesting that "the coming of Christ" and "of the coming week" are very old, while "I prefer him coming first" is relatively new (possibly Early Modern)? And what about "I prefer his coming first" and "I see him coming" (verb of perception): I would expect the last two to be older? I wasn't sure about the full scope of your two constructions. – Cerberus - Reinstate Monica Sep 01 '13 at 01:01
  • @Cerberus Sort of-- "Christ-GEN coming" and "coming-GEN week-GEN" go back to old English, but at that time English of course had an inflectional system and the noun phrases are actually inflected in the genitive case (or whatever case necessary in the second example). Then, with regard to the relative timings of when the other formulae started to emerge, I'm still not exactly sure, though I agree with your suspicion. – Neil Coffey Sep 01 '13 at 02:04
  • @Cerberus According to the Cambridge History of the English Language (p. 291), a gerund with a noun phrase "subject" without an 's (e.g. "it was true of this light continuing") appears in 'Middle English', and the oblique pronoun ("impaired by me telling") from 'Late Middle English', implying -- I suppose -- that the development was that way round. I guess one would have to go back to the sources cited for more concrete evidence/explanation. (Which I would be fascinated to do in principle, but fear time will not permit at the moment!) – Neil Coffey Sep 01 '13 at 02:21
  • Sorry for any neglect of the obvious, but will you please clarify the antecedent of the 3 its in your 2nd paragraph? –  Mar 19 '16 at 05:47
  • @LePressentiment I mean a participle-gerund (word ending in -ing) – nohat Apr 29 '16 at 00:39
  • @nohat If you get a chance, could you take a look at this question? This current answer of yours has elsewhere been used to support the notion of “dual parts of speech” for -ing words, but I think that either those folks have misunderstood you, or perhaps that I have. – tchrist May 07 '17 at 01:18
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    As a note to people looking to this thread in the future, a few modern grammars no longer feel the need to differentiate between gerund and participle. They instead use the combined term "gerund-participle". I find this to be appealing for the average learner as a result of the ongoing frustrations with the terms; "Is this more adverbial or adjectival?", "Is it more of a noun or verb?", etc. – AJK432 Jun 03 '19 at 19:17
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A gerund is used as a noun, a participle as an adjective.

Gerund:

Traveling is fun.

Participle:

The traveling man stopped.

The Purdue Online Writing Lab has good explanation sheets on gerunds and participles.

Edward Tanguay
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  • I'd say this is far too clumsy an approach. 'Flying planes can be dangerous' is certainly not using 'flying' as [if it were?] a noun (unlike 'Flying can be dangerous'), but is ambiguous between the adjective and the more verblike sense. – Edwin Ashworth Apr 06 '16 at 15:16
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A gerund is always used as a noun in a sentence but a participle always modifies the meaning of an adjective and an adverb.

RegDwigнt
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siraj jan
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